This past Saturday the music and entrainment industry lost a star, a beautiful voice, and a personally that won’t be matched. Of course I’m speaking of Whitney Houston, but this is not about her.

I opened Hootsuite on Saturday to see lines, streams of tweets all with kind words and amazement over her talent and the lose. Now as we all know Twitter, and for its part Facebook are all about the NOW, and they were both exploding.

I sat down with an idea to watch a few skate videos, tweet a few things out, and just interact with the online world. Boy was I wrong. I pushed out my daily music, tweeted a nice RIP Whitney and was about to make my exit when Simon Pegg became the unwitting target of an online drive by.

Unknown to Peg he tweeted like it was any other night. Within minutes he must have been inundated with nastiness and hate tweets because he pushed out an I’m sorry of sorts that had a little tone of the macabre.

My point in all this is that we as social media and content providers need to understand the NOW, and educate our clients about it. In a room full of people screaming your not going to be heard yelling, and if you are heard make sure your not the one drinking a beer at a wine party.

Embracing the NOW is not only important when it comes to sensitive topics, but should be on the top of your list before you post, tweet, pin, or hit the record button. Writers are always taught who, what, when, where, and why. Well Social Media Providers needs to add a now? on to any stories or post they write.

Consider the NOW is what you do, educate your clients about the NOW, and remember you never get a second chance at NOW in this overburdened media maelstrom we live in today.